


Christmas Star

by HeyMcRaely



Category: Joker (2019)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22853164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeyMcRaely/pseuds/HeyMcRaely
Summary: Sometimes the grit of Gotham adds to the Christmas cheer.
Relationships: Arthur Fleck/You
Kudos: 6





	Christmas Star

**Author's Note:**

> An amalgam of sensations found in the back of a scuzzy consignment shop at the edge of my neighborhood and childhood memories of the old Smiley's Yarns under the elevated railway in Queens at Christmastime.

You visit the consignment shop with Arthur. It’s a Saturday and it’s cold and they have plastic Santas lined up in the window and it’s him in worn-out jacket, you in corduroy backpack; your gloves coming unraveled at the fingertips and his with a tear in the palm from when he fell and scraped himself across the sidewalk. You need a tree topper. Something like a star. Together you pick through grimy Christmas ornaments from bankrupted stores. You like the red ones. When he dusts one off on his jacket sleeve, it shines, and you know what he’s going to do the moment before he does it; holding it up to his nose with a sly smile, head tipped down, looking up at you, knowingly.

There’s your laughter. There’s the chaotic jangle of the bell over the door, there’s customers shouting to one another in different languages, there’s the radio fuzzing a Christmas station overhead. You wander a while between the soft cardboard boxes and cheap snowglobes. You sift through a bin of old photographs and realize Arthur has stilled, staring at one. He tilts it for you to see.

It’s black and white, a pale dress in the flash, and a woman in the dress, her hand on the arm of a man in a suit. She’s got a sweater she’s holding out and her mouth open talking, smiling. The man is just halfway in the frame, but he has a cigarette in his smile and his hand on her waist, as if he’s about to swing her into a dance. Nothing behind or around them but blackness and a clock on a wall. One hand at the eleven, one hand barely past the two. 11:11.

Arthur makes eye contact with you, and your faces are close. He blinks long eyelashes. He moves the photo, emphasizing. “This one feels like us.” 

And there’s the jangle of the bell again and someone knocks over something and there’s the beginning of Christmas Time is Here and there’s your toes curling in your wet socks in your leaky winter boots. And when you leave, you hold hands so the holes in his gloves and the holes in your gloves are covered, warm on warm. And when you get home there’s an old photograph in your tree where there would be a star.


End file.
